How to Recover a Stolen Laptop with Prey

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There are plenty of ways to keep your laptop from being stolen, but when your laptop does get lifted, reporting your loss to the police may get you a police report that you can use for insurance purposes, but it likely won’t result in a region-wide manhunt and search to get your laptop back.

Thankfully there are a number of apps that can help you take the situation into your own hands and get your laptop back. We’ll take a look at a few of them, but this guide focuses on Prey, a free and open-source option that supports Mac OS X, Windows, Linux, and Android. The developers are working on an iOS version as well.

First, we don’t suggest you confront whoever stole your laptop. These tools are designed to help you pinpoint where your laptop is and even get proof of who’s using it so you can hand the information to police, who can then get the thief and return your laptop to you. Even so, it bears repeating: don’t do anything dangerous. Use these tools to work with the police, not to become a vigilante — or worse, a victim of a violent crime.

Getting Started with Prey

Prey is a tiny application that sits quietly as a background agent on your computer until it gets the signal that you’ve reported it missing. Installing Prey is as simple as downloading it from the site and double-clicking the installer. The installer walks you through the process of registering for an account at Prey, and as soon as you’re registered you can access the Prey control panel on the web.

The control panel is where you’ll go to see reports from your device and to report it missing if it’s ever stolen. Once you’re logged in, you’ll see a list of all your devices and their current statuses. You can drill down on any device to see its serial number and configuration, which the agent usually gets right: if your laptop is accidentally identifying as a desktop, you can switch it. You can even look to see how much RAM is in your system, what the BIOS version is, and how fast the CPU is.

Getting Prey installed and set up is remarkably easy: install the agent, sign up, verify your account and make sure monitoring is active, and you’re protected. Prey is free to download and use as long as you’re tracking less than four devices.

If you buy a Prey Pro account you can track anywhere from 10 to 500 devices, get your reports sent via SSL, and set Prey to “active mode,” where your stolen device continuously streams data to Prey’s servers, instead of periodically on a pre-set schedule. Pro accounts run between $5/month and $399/month depending on how many devices you want to track.

Using Prey to Find a Stolen Laptop

Hopefully Prey is just an insurance policy that you’ll never need, but if your laptop does get stolen, the first thing you’ll want to do is log in to the Prey control panel and report your device missing. As soon as you do, the control panel will ping the sleeping agent on your laptop or phone and tell it to wake up and start collecting information.

Once you’ve reported your laptop missing, Prey collects geolocation data from your the onboard GPS, or triangulates your laptop’s position based on nearby Wi-Fi hotspots. It also keeps an eye on active network connections, will capture the SSIDs of nearby hotspots, and get the IP address the computer is being used from.

That’s all helpful for finding out where the device is located, but Prey takes it a step further. The app will get regular screenshots from your laptop so you can see what the thief is doing with your laptop, and will even run a report of recently modified files so you can see if the thief is looking for something or changing anything on your system. Prey will also turn on your webcam and take a photo of the thief as well.

The screenshots, photos, and location data are all uploaded to the Prey control panel, so you see them as soon as they’re taken and can pass along the data instantly to the police. Most police departments won’t even act on a stolen laptop report unless they have enough concrete information to authorize an apprehension. Prey tries to give it to them in the form of detailed network information, location information, and a photo of the person using the stolen laptop.

If you want to be more aggressive about it, you can tell Prey to sound an alarm or show an on-screen alert that your laptop has been stolen, is being monitored, and that you know who the thief is and where they are. You can also lock your laptop so it requires a password, or completely secure your laptop so emails are hidden, all browser cookies are deleted, and all stored passwords are cleared.

Tagged In

Excellent idea. We recovered a PC one time that emailed home on bootup, and I wrote something similar for a few of my machines.
My only concern with the professional products like Prey is, what happens if the central server is hacked ? At first glance it would appear to have stored a lot of private information including details on how to access all the customer’s machines.

@ First page, last paragraph:Why alert the thief in any way at all? This thing only works if the computer is turned on and connected to the Internet, which would be very unlikely to happen once the thief knows there’s a defense mechanism.

Anonymous

Duh you don’t have to. Only if you want to. Are you people illiterate?

Almost any thief into stealing laptops or even desktops would probably know that all he/she would need to do to cover their tracks would be to completely blow out the hard drive meaning format it or even replace it thus wiping out everything on it – ALONG WITH PREY OR ANY OTHER APP! If the thief is really smart then he/she might even copy all of the software product ID’s for re-installation or even pirate re-sale too (HINT HINT!). Then again, thieves were never known for being smart either – just like some “journalists” looking to make a easy buck (by phoning it in).

When I started reading the article I was hoping someone actually came up with some sort of device, technique, BIOS update or something that allowed a person to find his/her computer regardless of what was on the hard drive or even if the PC had a hard drive. Perhaps there was a way to read CPU serial numbers and covertly report them to some sort of agency or something – not some stupid TSR or rootkit!

So PLEASE don’t waste my time with another worthless article like this. PLEASE! I mean, I thought Extreme Tech was about TECH. Not pseudo science mumbo jumbo jokes like Prey. And really. Prey? Didn’t the name even give you a clue that it was a joke? Don’t you think fluff articles like this belong in publications like National Enquirer and NOT a Ziff Davis publication?

Give me a BREAK!

If I wanted to make an illegal buck, I’d come up with a USB key that copies software product ID’s from unsuspecting coffee shop surfers systems or even do it via WiFi! I could then make pirate copies of these software products and sell them on Craiglist to the never ending idiots looking to save a buck (since the software publishers are too stupid to sell their products at an AFFORDABLE price). And since most of the software copyright owners are so forgiving with their licenses and activations anyone buying my pirate copies would then even be able to activate their illegal products never knowing (cause they’re idiots) that they are engaging in software piracy. No need to take the risk of stealing a PC. Why bother when the info on the PC is worth SO MUCH MORE?!

Anonymous

Couldn’t be arsed to read the article could you douchebag?

Most thieves steal laptops to sell them or use them themselves, they’re not interested in the information on the system unless they’re basement-dwelling mouth-breathers like you. Life isn’t an action movie and most people who take laptops aren’t going to take them home and add them to their super-hyper-grid or whatever bullshit you think they are because you watched Swordfish too many times. Sit down and leave the tech to the big boys.

Marc Bebee

HAHAHAHAHA, ok while I’m normally not into flame wars, that was an inspired shot.

@Kiss, I am a police officer and have taken many stolen laptop reports. Mainly because people leave them in their vehicles. Nevertheless, crackheads and heroin addicts steal these items to pawn them. Many times Dell (and they are the best at recovering from a brand perspective) calls us after a person bought the laptop in a pawnshop, obviously not knowing it was stolen.

Marc Bebee

While the software may have limitations, the price is right and at least offers some shot at recovery or deletion of your data (which personally I think is more important). If youre really looking at securing your data, you should use encryption of the entire drive either through built in OS features like bitlocker or through freeware like truecrypt (which I’ve used for years and which works extremely well even on low cpu powered laptops). That way, your data is safe from the vast majority of villains no matter what happens.

The other thing about this software that’s a little scary is that I can see people using it to spy on others by installing it and then reporting the laptop “stolen” but never filing a report with police.

Thanks Alan for sharing this post, i think LockItTight features wise better than Prey, but anyways thanks

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